"What's life for if there's no time to play and explore?" In The Weirdness of the World (Princeton UP, 2024), Eric Schwitzgebel invites the reader to a walk on the wilder side of philosophical speculation about the cosmos and consciousness. Is consciousness entirely a material phenomenon? How much credence should we have in the existence of a world outside our minds? Are there multiple parallel universes? Schwitzgebel, a professor of philosophy at the University of California-Riverside, constructs chains of conditional probabilities to explore the zone just beyond the edge of what we can understand, however imperfectly, given current scientific theory. He distinguishes hypothetical scenarios that are not worth taking seriously – like being a brain in a vat – from those that are just plausible enough to deserve playful, yet motivated, consideration.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/philosophy
Thomas Kelly, "Bias: A Philosophical Study" (Oxford UP, 2023)
Monima Chadha, "Selfless Minds: A Contemporary Perspective on Vasubandhu's Metaphysics" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Timothy Cleveland, "Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable" (Lexington Books, 2022)
Derrick Darby, "A Realistic Blacktopia: Why We Must Unite to Fight" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Hil Malatino, "Side Affects: On Being Trans and Feeling Bad" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
Oana Serban, "After Thomas Kuhn: The Structure of Aesthetic Revolutions" (de Gruyter, 2022)
Tommie Shelby, "The Idea of Prison Abolition" (Princeton UP, 2022)
Nancy J. Nersessian, "Interdisciplinarity in the Making: Models and Methods in Frontier Science" (MIT Press, 2022)
Alexander Kirshner, "Legitimate Opposition" (Yale UP, 2022)
Charles Goodman, "The Tattvasaṃgraha Of Śāntarakṣita: Selected Metaphysical Chapters" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Tristan Grøtvedt Haze, "Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity" (Routledge, 2022)
Saba Bazargan-Forward, "Authority, Cooperation, and Accountability" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Leah Kalmanson, "Cross-Cultural Existentialism: On the Meaning of Life in Asian and Western Thought" (Bloomsbury, 2020)
Neil Levy, "Bad Beliefs: Why They Happen to Good People" (Oxford UP, 2021)
Michele Moody-Adams, "Making Space for Justice: Social Movements, Collective Imagination, and Political Hope" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Kim Q. Hall, "Queering Philosophy" (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022)
Kelly McCormick, "The Problem of Blame: Making Sense of Moral Anger" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
Pascah Mungwini, "African Philosophy: Emancipation and Practice" (Bloomsbury, 2022)
Igor Douven, "The Art of Abduction" (MIT Press, 2022)
Cécile Fabre, "Spying Through a Glass Darkly: The Ethics of Espionage and Counter-Intelligence" (Oxford UP, 2022)
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
New Books in Sociology
New Books in Psychoanalysis
New Books in Anthropology
New Books in African American Studies
New Books in Islamic Studies